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What happened to Amelia Earhart?

After reexamining measurements of a skeleton from 1940 found on the island of Nikumaroro (Kiribati), scientists think that the skeleton could be of Amelia Earhart. This helps support the theory that Earhart died stranded on the island.

The skeleton was found in 1940 on the island of Nikumaroro. The bones were examined by a doctor who said the bones were of a male. At some point, the bones were lost, but the files with the skeleton’s measurements were saved. After studying the measurements again, and applying modern scientific methods, it’s been determined that the bones could have been of Earhart.

In 1937, Earhart, an American pilot, along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on a mission to fly around the planet. They were on their way from Lae (Papua New Guinea) to Howland Island (territory of the USA) when their plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, and was never found. Many people have looked for their plane over the last 79 years. It has been a mystery as to what happened to the two of them.

Some folks have had a theory that Earhart and Noonan made an emergency landing on Nikumaroro, and were simply stuck there. Nikumaroro was an uninhabited atoll at the time, and the two eventually died. There have been other clues discovered on Nikumaroro which support this theory. A metal piece was found and some researchers say that it was the patch used to cover a window on Earhart’s plane. Shoe fragments were discovered which had the characteristics of shoes Earhart wore.

Earhart was born in 1897 in Kansas, USA. During World War I, she worked as a nurse for wounded soldiers. In 1920, she took her first ride on an airplane, and got hooked to flying. Three years later, she got an international pilot’s license. She was the 16th woman in the world to receive it. She set many records, and one of them was the first woman to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean (1932).

Kiribati is one of the first countries to welcome in the New Year. It lies in the Pacific Ocean just west of the International Date Line, an imaginary line on the surface of the Earth that separates two consecutive calendar days.

Here are two videos, one is about Earhart and the other is more on this story.

Did you know?

Kiribati is the only country in the world to fall into all four hemispheres (northern, southern, eastern, and western).